New York (NY) Times, "What Shall Be Done For Virginia?," April 3, 1857

   WHAT SHALL BE DONE FOR VIRGINIA?––

   A Virginia paper gives the alarm to the slaveholding interest of the Old Dominion, asserting that the drainage of slaves is so great that in a very few years the institution must cease to exist. It is a rarity, the alarmist says, for a day to go by without at least one hundred negroes passing southward through Petersburg. On the other hand, the Northern Press is constantly recording the escape of slaves northward. The facilities furnished by what are known as underground railroads were never so actively employed. Virginia is the chief sufferer by these stampedes; and as data are not wanting to compute the exodus, it must be owned the occasion fully justifies the agitation of the journalist referred to. At least two thousand slaves escaped last year from Virginia to the Free States and to Canada. If we are to place any reliance upon the estimated involuntary emigration southward along the great mail route, thirty thousand were during the same period sold in the Southern markets. The annual mortality, according to the census returns of 1850, is 2,000. The same returns gave the entire slave population of the State at 472,528. Agreeably to the natural laws of increase, it ought to be 520,000 in 1860. What will it be if we deduct an annual depletion of of 41,000? Exactly 110,00. The account standing thus:

Slave population in 1850..............472,528

Normal increase in ten years........47,472-520,000

Mortality in ten years....................90,000

Emigration in ten years, voluntary

and involuntary.............................290,000-418,000

Slave population in 1860..............110,000

In other words: from constituting one-third of the entire population, as it did in 1850, it will constitute one-tenth; and so cease to serve, supposing it ever did serve, as an adequate resource for labor. There is evidently cause of serious alarm in such calculations. If they err in over-estimating the drain, the error is readily corrected by reading 1865 or 1870 for the year assumed. The self-ellimination of Slavery in Virginia is indeed but a question of time; that time by no probability exceeding a score of years. Forty counties on the western slope of the Alleghenies are already so far freed from slaves as to stand ready for emancipation. 

   As it is clearly out of the question to prevent this result, common sense suggests some sort of preparation for it. To replace the paltering, ineffectual labor of Africans, with the sturdy, productive nerve of white men; to replace exhausted capital with the freely offered means of immigrants, farmers, and settlers of every description; to reanimate the lands worn out by unsparing planting; and to bring under cultivation the vast tracts as yet virgin of axe and plow, should be the grand aim of every patriotic Virginian. To neglect all these, in the insane eagerness to clasp more firmly negro Slavery, which will not stay, is an infatuation equaled only by that of the hopeless opium or arsenic eater.